1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording apparatus, an information recording method, a program storage medium and a computer data signal embodiment in a carrier wave. In detail, the present invention relates to an information recording apparatus for and an information recording method of recording record information such as music information, picture information or the like, which is distributed through a network, for example, such as Internet or the like, on a recording medium such as an optical disc, a magnetic disc, a semiconductor memory or the like, and a program storage medium and a computer data signal embodiment in a carrier wave, which allow a computer to function as such an information recording apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the research and the development with regard to a recording format have been advanced for recording audio information, which includes music information, sound information and the like, on a recording medium, for example, such as DVD or the like.
On the other hand, music distribution for distributing the above-mentioned audio information and the like through the network, such as Internet or the like, to a personal computer and the like is lately started (typically, this may be referred to as EMD (Electronic Music Distribution). Thus, even the above-mentioned recording format currently being developed is desired to comply with this method of the music distribution.
At the present time, as the distributing method (to be exact, a compressing method used for the distribution), there are mixed various distributing methods which are not compatible with each other, for example, such as AC-3 (Audio Compression-3) method, MP3 (MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) 1 Audio layer 3) method and the like.
In the conventional method of the music distribution, if the pieces of the music information distributed in accordance with the respective methods are recorded in their original states on the recording medium such as a DVD and the like, various kinds of music information compressed by the different compression methods are mixed on one recording medium. If several reproducing modules corresponding to respective compression methods are applied to the information reproducing apparatus, such various kinds of music information may be reproduced by one information reproducing apparatus,
However, this causes an increase of a manufacturing cost of the information reproducing apparatus, because, if there is not compatibility of the reproducing modules each other, the respective reproducing modules are separately built in the information reproducing apparatus.
Consequently, this problem brings about an increase in an entire manufacturing cost as an information recording/reproducing system including the information reproducing apparatus and an information recording apparatus for recording the music information on a recording medium because of the increase in the manufacturing cost as the information reproducing apparatus, and thereby results in a problem that the information recording/reproducing system can not be popularized.